Johnny Mack with five good news stories. As you can imagine, coming off
the Christmas holiday, a lot of Christmas stories out there. How about Christine
Lily. She lives in Kyle, Texas, and she goes all out on
her Christmas decorations. Back in twenty twenty, she was getting ready to spend
Christmas without her two children, they were both stationed on military bases. She
says she thought back to the Christmases of her childhood in Arkansas, when her
mother, Sandy would make gingerbread houses would stare at the house and wait for
the day we could eat it. So she decided to turn her house into
a giant gingerbread house and a new annual tradition was born. You can imagine
this gets hundreds of visitors. Each visitor is treated to a free cup of
hot chocolate and photos with Santa, played by Lily's husband, Robert Well.
He says he was dubious at first, but he soon embraced it and now
eagerly greets guests and hands out candy. Lily. He has now turned this
into a larger purpose, asking visitors for canned food donations to help combat food
insecurity in the local community. Some visitors also donate money. So if you
look at the house here, it is totally created as a gingerbread house,
where the molding is alongside the roof and the door frames. It's all in
the kind of candy cane color scheme that you would see in a gingerbread house,
and the house itself is gingerbread colored. He might want to become friends
with Raymond Roberts. He recently played the lottery and his intuition told him don't
just buy one ticket, buy six, and don't use any numbers. Use
the exact same numbers on each ticket. While the numbers came in the tickets
were three hundred and ninety thousand dollars each. He took the lump sum for
five of the tickets. That gets some two million dollars For the six ticket.
He chose the annuity option, so he'll get twenty annual payments of twenty
five grand. What were the numbers? It was a combination of birthday as
an anniversary dates. What will he do with the money. He's going to
buy a motorcycle. Doctor Steve Loam was running the half marathon. He says,
in the twelve years he's been a cardiologist, he's never had to give
anyone CPR outside of his shift, but during the Monterey Bay Half Marathon in
California, he had to give CPR twice. Around the third mile, Gregory
Gonzalez fell down in front of Loam, hitting his head on the page.
Loam immediately began to give him CPR, and after several minutes he was transferred
to an amulets. Loam jumped back into the race, but not long after
crossing the finish line, the same thing happened again. This time, Michael
Heilman fell to the ground, hitting his head. Loam rushed to give him
CPR as well. Turned out, both men had blockages that led to cardiac
arrests, and they received stants in their coronary arteries. Loam, Gonzalez,
and Hilman planned to run the half marathon together in twenty twenty three. Gonzale
says, there's not a day that goes by where I don't have tears of
joy, absolute joy. I'm here with the second chance at life. From
the Washington Post. A puppy was abandoned at an airport. Don't worry,
this is five good news stories. These never ended on a dark note.
Trust me here and the dog's owner left the puppy at the San Francisco International
Airport. An international passenger had arrived from China without the proper paperwork, and
his travel companion abandoned him at customs. The CDC had some concern about the
validity of the paperwork. Instead of straightening out the problem, the owner surrendered
the dog and flew to the East Coast. United had the dog. The
CDC suggested two courses of action that United could take, return the puppy to
China or leave him at SFO, but neither choice was going to end too
well. The initial options were very grim I'll leave it at that, but
the team at SFO refused to accept a tragic fate for the dog, now
named Polaris, after the airline's business class, They decided to find a third
way. They contacted the company's governmental affairs team in Washington and San Francisco for
help. The staff lobbied for the CDC to reverse the ruling. The agency
granted Polaris a reprieve, but ordered a four month quarantine. During the four
month quarantine, Polaris had to live on the airport premises. The staff built
him a makeship home in an airport office. The Canine Cave featured such top
flight amenities as dogbed toys, treats at twenty four seven babysitting. Towards the
end of the journey, United transported Polaris to the La Quarantine Station first class,
so we knew he'd be taken care of. He was so good for
the entire ride down. He didn't bark at all. They reached out to
the San Francisco SPCA. Lisa f. Fader is the chief of Rescue an
animal welfare there and said, I've been working in animal welfare for twenty five
years, counter a lot of situations that are unique and interesting. This was
a first for us. The rescue center received thirty five applications, then they
winnowed it down to the top five. They picked the winner's name out of
a dog bowl. The winner William Dale, United pilot. He said,
I only hope we can do half as good a job as taking care of
him as the United staff did. More than one employee said to me,
you had better take good care of him or else. And now about this
one. Right before the weekend, Principal Jack Knack, great name Principal Knack
was told that Friday was going to be a snow day in Appleton, Wisconsin.
For Nack, it was the moment he'd been waiting for for years.
He'd been recording clips they would eventually edit together to make the big snow day
announcement. He put out a parody set to the tune of Oldtown Road called
Official Richmond Appleton's Snow Day twenty twenty two. The video was shown as students
in their classrooms Thursday afternoon. The video begins with Principal Knack fueling up a
snow plow, turning it on, and exiting from his garage onto a snow
covered driveway. I'm not going to sing here, but the lyrics, Yeah,
I'm going to say my plow through the old driveway, I'm going to
snow blow out to the end of day. He told today. This was
our first snow day, which is strange here in Wisconsin, first time in
two years. That's very surprising to me as well. So I've kind of
been playing with this one for a while. It only took a couple of
days in the scheme of things, but it was a two year project because
we were just waiting for some snow to come. Nax revealed he actually finished
the parody last year, but he had to make some edits after the school
district changed superintendence. I told her I had her name in and I had
to put in his name. I had to rerecord some things, even the
last second because I kind of saw the storm come in and I'm like,
hey, maybe we can finally share this. He's gonna work on a new
video, he said, Old Town wrote is a good one. I don't
know if I could top that one, but we'll see. That's your kidneys
for today. I have a great day.